Operational Resilience

What is Operational Resilience?

Operational resilience is an organisation’s ability to detect, prevent, respond to, recover and learn from operational disruptions that may impact delivery of important business and economic functions or underlying business services. 

The key components of operational resilience - which include defining and understanding important business services and impact tolerance, as well as completing end-to-end mapping, scenario testing, and regular self-assessments - are essential guideposts on the road to resiliency.

Why is it important?

Resilience is ingrained in our vocabulary, especially in today’s challenging business landscape. In its simplest form, resilience can be defined as the ability to recover from setbacks. Unlike risk, which has a probabilistic component and creates significant uncertainty, operational resilience must be contemplated as an inevitability.

Systems will fail, cyber-attacks will be successful, and pandemics will occur. Having a firm understanding of how to minimise the impact of a disruption to your external stakeholders and the broader economy, knowing where your organisation’s vulnerabilities lie, and developing your foundational elements  (e.g., cyber, business, third-party, and technology resilience) will help your organisation recover more quickly and minimise customer harm.

What is the connection between operational resilience and business continuity management? 

Business Continuity Management (BCM) is the design, development, implementation and maintenance of strategies, teams, plans and actions that provide protection over, or alternative modes of operation for, those activities or business processes which, if they were to be interrupted, might bring about seriously damaging or potentially significant loss to an enterprise.